Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on consumer law litigation and appellate practice. He is also a working musician and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in the Shaw Neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, where he lives half-time with his two extraordinary daughters.

I’ve seen that nonsense, and while certainly some of the Founders no doubt had something like that in mind, there is also no doubt others had something else entirely in mind. The absurdity in this is to presume a stated right or principle ever only has one source of inspiration or that if that such a single source can be touted as sufficient to disregard all the others reasons.

The purpose of the Second Amendment was to assert that military force and right to wield it domestically did not reside only and exclusively with a centralized government, but with The People. That said, we need to understand that the Founders, who knew English quite well, did not mean expressly Persons, but The People as a political entity, which concept is consistent with their idea that all political power and authority resides with The People.

The legitimate uses of that authority will vary region to region and change over time. Strict constructionists in this are as wrong as the NRA, who would rather not deal with original intent but with some Libertarian Nirvana formulation of happy hunters forming a bulwark against a modern army.

The ultimate repudiation of the Southern desire to maintain militias for the suppression of slaves was the Civil War wherein that motivation was fairly well excised from legitimate political thinking. To bring it up now as some kind of excuse for one side or the other is specious, since we are not talking about the 19th Century, but today, which is very, very different.